Many attempts have been made to bring the 3-D viewing experience to film, video, and broadcast displays. Stereoscopic cameras with merged outputs have been used to capture binary images of a solid object or scene. Inexpensive eyeglasses with plastic color or polarizing filters were used to separate the two images projected in different colors or polarizations on a television, movie screen, or computer display, and a quasi-3D image could be observed, albeit with some aberrations. Holographic true 3-D image capture and display technology has been demonstrated under well-controlled conditions. Holographic display and image capture technology is limited in its application because of various challenges including the extremely precise alignments required.
New technologies have been pioneered by the display industry that show great promise of producing a true 3-D viewing experience. What is needed is a better and more robust way to define and record the 3-D still and video data and to produce 3-D solid models of an object or scene. The present invention is a 3-D camera and production system incorporating elements of the 3-D technology disclosed in Stettner et al, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,696,577, 6,133,989, 5,629,524, 6,414,746B1, 6,362,482, and U.S. patent application US 2002/0117340 A1, and which provides with a single pulse of light all the information of a conventional 2-D picture along with the third dimension coordinates and reflected intensity.
Conventional 2-D cameras for capturing visible images rely on rectangular arrays of pixilated light sensitive Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) or CMOS sensors. These sensors are generically referred to as focal plane arrays. They are positioned directly behind an imaging lens system in the focal plane of the lens.
The described device furnishes the 3-D coordinates of every reflective point in its field of view, and provides for registration and integration of these range data pixels with the output of a conventional visible 2-D imaging system, to produce a true 3-D visual image frame. The system further provides a 3-D object definition and modeling capability by coupling multiple hybrid 3-D camera systems via fiber optic link to a scene compositor which is capable of developing 3-D imagery and fully rendering the dimensions of any object or scene in the common field of view.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,734,756 issued to Butterfield et al, describes a stereoscopic camera and viewing system which makes use of chromatic viewing devices, typically anaglyph glasses, to channel each stereoscopic image the appropriate eye.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,760,134 issued to Schilling et al, shows a three dimensional true color holographic imaging system using three primary color Fresnel-Zone-Pattern laser generators combined as a single beam. The combined beam is then scanned across the target and the reflections sensed by a single electronic detector. The detector signals corresponding to each generator are then separated electronically.